dan1 wrote:
Hello,
I would like to replace one of the disks in a raid 1 array (software
raid) in centos 4.4 for the purpose of >saving the removed drive as a
backup of the system. Replace it with a new disk and have the raod
>resync. That way the removed disk can be used to restore the system
to that point in time if something >dramatic occured.
I have a number of questions, I can’t find the answers to and I don't
have a system I can play with to see >how the software behaves:
1) Do I need to partition the replacement drive or will the system do
it after reboot?
2) Should I break the raid before replacement or just shutdown,
replace and reboot?
3) I have also read that acronis 10 rescue CD can be booted and take
a system image that way but I >have not tried that yet..
In general, are these approaches a good idea for generating an
offsite image backup??
Any help or input would be appreciated.
Thank you,
-ed-
Hello, Ed.
We will most probably have to talk together. I have the exact same
purpose than you have. I am working like this since several years and
it is absolutely great (with mdadm software raid 1).
I do even go further: I synchronise remotely a complete system on a
local software raid system with rsync and then I can boot up the
backuped system whenever I want, and it will just be a working and
bootable backup mirror, on another system. But it is not always so
easy, problems do arise doing this, and I am working on it.
To answer your questions:
1) You need to fdisk your partitions yourself on the disk, exactly the
same way the source partitions have been done, it is not done
automatically. Once this is done, you need to add the partitions to
the working md array. It takes time to synchronise everything. All
depends on the speed of your disk transfer, but if you have about
50Mbytes/sec, you need more than a hour for a 200 Gbytes array.
Use sfdisk to partition the new disk
eg.
sfdisk -l /dev/hda | sfdisk /dev/hdb
[snipped]
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
